Welcome to the Toronto AngularJS meetup. We generally try to meet the 3rd Wednesday of every month. Join our group and follow us on twitter for updates,@NGToronto.

AngularJS is the future of web development. It's so much better than everything else you'll shed tears of joy as you finally shed the trauma of out-of-control unobtrusive JavaScript (how on earth do you figure out what a page does?), jQuery (amazing but it doesn't scale), overloaded CSS (update at your own risk!) and the resulting expensive and unmaintainable web applications. AngularJS is to jQuery what jQuery is to non-library JavaScript. It's that good.

The 5 D's of AngularJS:

1. DRY. Don't repeat yourself, which means no boilerplate.

2. Declarative. HTML is the template and markup with AngularJS directives is the templating language. This works perfectly thanks to the next two D's.

3. Dependency injection. Now I'm crying. You can actually test AngularJS apps, but more importantly you have scoping kung-fu where everything is modular, decoupled, and has a clearly logical place to go. It's pretty, implicit, magical, and it fixes 90% of what's wrong with every other JavaScript framework.

4. Data-binding. Now I'm openly weeping with joy. Data-binding in a dependency managed, magically scoped, declarative, and DRY language is beautiful, amazingly succinct and powerful. Data-binding isn't the start with Angular- it's result. And this is the essence of Angular- the magic is in how everything works together. Dry + Declarative + Dependency Injection + Data-binding ALL work together. Remove one of them and AngularJS isn't AngularJS.

5. Designer-Friendly. Your CSS will no longer look like you wrote it while on crack, and you can see within the HTML the general outline of what those developers are doing. And with that, you are free to go to town on the markup so long as you don't delete the ng- magic tags. Yes, dear designer, you can change the markup and style the application without destroying the business logic. How cool is that.